Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

View from the coffee shop from which I’m posting (click to enlarge).  I’m playing a little hooky this cool but fine afternoon, walking along Alki Beach in West Seattle.  See, I was working in the SoDo area just south of downtown and the baseball stadium, and I learned that the Mariners were having a game at Safeco starting at 3:30.  When I finished up at 2:30, I could have made one more client stop, or simply gone home to squeeze in a couple more chargeable hours.

But I thought, hey, traffic might be a little dicey (the stadium was between me and home), so why not just hop on the West Seattle Freeway and enjoy a walk along the water?  I’ve hiked about 3 miles, with another mile or so back to the car.  It’s only been 2 hours, but somehow I feel as if I’ve been on vacation for a couple of days.

More pictures and yakking later.  I need to live in the moment a bit.

My flight home Friday night was uneventful, although about a half hour late arriving in Seattle. When you’re bumping up against midnight, though, a half-hour seems a little bit larger than it does at noon. The sun was setting as we approached the Minneapolis airport, casting long shadows over the still-dormant landscape (Click any photo to enlarge

Despite the late arrival, I dragged myself out of bed Saturday morning to kayak with a friend on Puget Sound. Turned out to be a good decision, as this was our first real spring weekend. There was little to no wind, and the water was dead calm. Nice for us, not so for the gaggle of sailboats that were amassing for a regatta just off Shilshole Marina (below, left).

The fellow on the right has found a nice, private sliver of beach on which to sun himself, but his solitude comes at a price!

Saturday evening, we attended a charity auction for Washington Water Trails Association, a kayak advocacy group for whom I recently became a board member and treasurer. We’ve attended their auction the last few years, and it’s low-key and convivial, especially when compared to other charity auctions we’ve attended. Unlike some private-school auctions we’ve attended, where there was hilarious one-upmanship, and people were bidding $10k to host a girls’ tea-party, I didn’t feel embarrassed to place bids in this one. The downside: I won a few.

The items below were donated by two of my clients, one a bakery and one a manufacturer/distributor to the outdoor industry. The auction was Caribbean-themed - thus the palm fronds in the frosting on the cake:

Part of the festivities was a silent auction, where items are arrayed on tables, and you fill in your name/number to bid. There are hors-d’oeurve plates interspersed with the auction items. You’d think that would dissuade people from snitching the actual auction items:

Our table missed out on my client’s cake, but we managed to nab a pretty nice coconut number.  I left a slice or two for the rest of the table:

There were about 180 people at the auction, and the bidding seemed energetic and competitive, but the recession has affected non-profit donations across the board, and I’m not looking for a miracle when we get the final tally today.

Spring stayed over another day, and Sunday was even warmer.  People were walking around in t-shirts and shorts, and the sexes were once again differentiated.  I was riding my bike along the Burke-Gilman trail towards Gasworks Park when I espied a young woman in a Missouri t-shirt.  The words “Show Me” got as far as the tip of my tongue and, fortunately, no further.

Just finishing a week in Milwaukee, nurturing and entertaining auditors from our CPA firm.  When I first saw three of them in the conference room on Monday, I thought it was a kindergarten class.  They were so young.  We thought of putting some toy trucks in there, and maybe hanging one of those Tweety Bird mobiles that you see suspended over cribs.  I used the office of the Accounts Payable guy, who was in Jamaica.  Coincidence?

I’ve been going to a health club about a mile from my hotel a couple times a week when I’m here for a workout.  This trip, they had a sign out for a promotion called The Bridal Boot Camp with three different packages: Beautiful Bride, Dream Day and Princess.  They also offer a group program for the whole wedding party.  Perhaps a game of Roller Derby at the reception?

I didn’t realize what a big business weddings were until I went to a wedding show when I worked for a bakery that made terrific wedding cakes.  The draw for us to pony up and attend was, according to the salesman for the show, “We’re going to have Brides With Budgets!”

Off to my plane - more over the weekendc.

So I sucked it up and attended my biennial physical exam yesterday.  That’s what it means by “physical”, I guess.  You actually have to go there.  So much of what I do is cyber- and virtual these days, and this event actually started in cyberspace - I made the appointment and received confirmation on my HMO’s website, and filled out an online questionnaire that used to be administered haphazardly by a harried nurse in the seconds before the doctor arrived in the exam room.

But for all of their sophistication and mouse-side manner, the WebMDs of the world are not yet able to reach out and fondle your nuts to see if anything untoward is going on down there, so I ultimately had to hie me thither and unpersuasively envelop my naked self in the standard-issue peek-a-boo muumuu.

Though I suffered the usual indignities stoically, the part that I dread most is when they want to draw blood, this time for a cholesterol test.  It’s not the pain I dread, it’s some murky psychological weirdness I have about veins, arteries and blood.  I hyperventilate a little, and get woozy sometimes just anticipating.  I’ve gotten so I simply tell the tech that I’ve got a phobia.  This time the woman said, “OK, let me tell you about my animals,” and I jumped in gratefully, asking probing questions about their personalities and relationships with each other, and you’d have thought I was on a first date, I was so animated.

Of course, it was over in seconds - I give good vein - and my spirit soared.  They bandage the puncture and say to keep it on for 15 minutes, but I’ve been known to wear one all day and through my evening shower, only daring near the end to remove it because it’s gotten soggy, fully expecting the wound to have developed into some hideous spurting hematoma.

Though it’s been certified that the Fountain of Youth has once again eluded me, I’m told the chances are reasonable that I’ll be slumping up there again in two years.  I’ll try to have the bandage off by then.

I have my laptop set up in two-screen mode (one onboard, one external) when I’m in my office, and I spent way too much of the weekend watching March Madness on one screen and telling myself I was multitasking on the other.  By the end of Saturday, I had foregone the deceit and had a game going on each screen, one Purdue-Washington and the other Duke-Texas.  At one point, both were in the final minute and either tied or within 2 points.

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We’re adjusting to the loss of the newspaper we’ve subscribed to since 1975, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  We’ve been fortunate during that period to have two daily newspapers with two sets of personalities and gradations (I wouldn’t say polar opposites) of political persuasion.  Oddly, the P-I, owned by Hearst, was the slightly more liberal paper, while the local family-controlled Times was more idiosyncratically conservative, reflecting, probably, the humors of its splenetic publisher.

I think the competition was great for the city, perhaps tempering the tendency of a paper to become a cheerleader and mouthpiece of the local establishment.  I thrilled in the 80s when the PI took as its mission the scourging of our Reaganesque Democrat governor, Dixy Lee Ray.  Dixy was an unflinchingly pro-development shill who never heard of an energy project she wouldn’t stump for, whether it was a supertanker port, an under-Sound oil pipeline or the archipelago of nuclear plants known as WPPSS.  A character appearing in a comic strip by the PI’s editorial cartoonist named Dipstick Duck sat in judgment.

The PI continues in truncated form as a web-only venture, and the “thunk” on our porch each morning now heralds the arrival of The Times.  We would probably discontinue taking a daily, but my MIL, who lives with us, takes pleasure in a paper with her breakfast.  Since I’ve been reading both papers online for several years and seldom actually handled the newsprint version, I can’t gauge the feeling of emptiness expressed by those for whom that tactility is a big part of their news-reading experience.  But a lot of distinctive voices in sports, arts, reportage and editorial have been silenced, and I will certainly miss their part of the local news chorus.

Last night was a full moon here in Seattle, and a few of my kayak buddies and I thought it would be cool to observe it from our boats. In a major upset, the evening was almost crystal clear - temps in the 20s, but little to no wind. We launched near Gasworks Park on Lake Union and paddled towards the University of Washington.

As we turned into the Montlake Cut, the moon revealed itself gloriously, making a river of light on the water and a silhouette of the Montlake Bridge in the air (Click to enlarge):

Usually the Cut - a short canal connecting Lake Union with Lake Washington - is rocking and rolling with motorboat wake, but last night it was our private reflecting pool.  We paddled through it and into a bayou-like area near the Arboretum.  There we consternated several herons, who squawked and took to ungainly flight, as well as several beaver, who slapped their tails on the surface of the water to show their displeasure.

We stayed pleasantly warm despite the water droplets from our paddles trying to freeze on our decks.  Visually, it could have been a balmy summer night.  GPS tale-o-the-tape here (which also includes the car trip down to the lake, due to user malfunction).

I was working downtown yesterday, and needed to head a bit north to the South Lake Union area in order to rescue a client in distress. (Distress that I may have caused, but let’s not go there.) The South Lake Union area, already home to medical complexes such as the Fred Hutchinson Center and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, is being built out into a mini-city almost single-handedly by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Corporation.

The city has done a number of things to accommodate the development, among them installing the South Lake Union Trolley, aka SLUT. I’d seen the trolley quite a few times, but yesterday was the first time I was actually going the same direction that it was, so I hopped on it (Click to enlarge):

In my view, mass transit that operates at street grade (as does the SLUT) is never going to reach the potential that transit in its own grade can provide.  Street-grade transit has to stop for stop lights, gets caught in the same traffic jams that single-occupancy cars do and can travel no faster than rush-hour traffic.

I thought it was ironic that, as we waited at a green light for some cars to clear a grid-locked intersection, I could see the anachronistic skeleton of what could have been an piece of a solution - the old monorail track from the 1962 World’s Fair:

A few years ago, we voted for funding and created an administrative infrastructure to build a modern monorail that would have connected two problematic parts of the city, operating above street level over its entire course.  I think it would have been a great emblem for the city, extending the symbolism of the old monorail in a functional piece of infrastructure.

But the Monorail always had its enemies and, after acquiring land and plotting several versions of a route, the project imploded due to funding doubts and municipal squabbling.  True, we’ll soon have a light rail system connecting downtown to the airport.  A lot of that system, however, will operate at street grade and, in my view, won’t have the cache that the Monorail would have.

Took another little stroll on Sunday, up to Phinney Ridge just west of Casa de Perils.  I believe this is the best view from a Starbucks cafe I’ve had the pleasure of gazing at while sipping my macchiato (see sidebar):

We caught a PBS broadcast of last night’s Stevie Wonder concert in the East Room of the White House.  An illustrious parade of musicians performed Stevie’s songs, ending with “Superstition”, performed by Stevie himself, sounding terrific.  I kept trying to guess who would do the (horrifyingly treacly) “Ebony and Ivory”.  My bet was on Barack and John McCain, but, alas, they passed over the number.  Obama kills me sometimes.  At the end of the concert, he said he’d just seen the most illustrious Stevie Wonder cover band ever.

Who has weekend plans?  Some folks I know are kayaking off Marrowstone Island, near Port Townsend, on Saturday, and I’ll be with them if the stars align (and it doesn’t snow any more like it did this morning - sheesh!)

Just ended a week of business travel, dancing through snowstorms in both Milwaukee and Minneapolis to arrive in Seattle only an hour late (albeit at 1am Saturday morning). This time, I really did sort of go around the dark side of the moon, blog-wise. I felt very out of touch, cerebrally, for most of the week.

Here’s the scene of my last contact before disappearing.  It’s the Northwest Airlines Worldclub in Detroit, where I alit between flights. It’s perched above the main corridor between the concourses, TSA and baggage claim, and it’s fun to watch the body language of both departures and arrivals through this river of humanity. Each has its qualities of jubilance and dread. There’s the business road warrior slumping either into or out of town with Monday on his mind; lovers ending a weekend that either succeeded wildly, or didn’t; arrivals from tropical climes, tans already cracking, boxed pineapple tucked under their arms as consolation prizes; student groups off on an adventure they’ve been saving for with car washes and bake sales, already forming their little alliances (Click photos to enlarge):

The work week was heavily involved in another variant of businesses trying to respond to the current financial crisis: excise muscle and amputate limbs in order to survive, and risk having no capacity to respond to an eventual upturn; or don’t act, and risk losing the entire business.  We’re in unprecedented territory; you can’t Google the answer.

I awoke Saturday to a sweet sorta-spring day, and I did a walk around the extended neighborhood to run errands and expel the plane from my lungs.  I stopped at a cafe for an espresso and bowl of delicious soup: a peanut-carrot-curry, with a stick of garlic bread.

There were some unusual things to photograph.  Lawns in my neighborhood are often found-art canvases.  Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes not:

A little late with the podcast, but I got the important stuff taken care of last night. I nabbed some caramels and a gift card at one of Mrs. Perils’ favorite pleasure-palaces (Click to enlarge):

I think I made the safe choice. I was talking with one of my clients this morning, and he was just then buying his wife’s Valentine gift. He was walking into Best Buy. I don’t think this will end well.

Since it’s almost impossible to beat your way into a restaurant tonight, we’re noshing on home-made pasta and an Aussie Syrah. I heard in interesting piece on NPR yesterday about how anguished restaurants are that Valentine’s Day falls on Saturday, because it co-opts what is normally a busy night anyway. I imagine their lobbying group is pushing Congress to fix the day on a Wednesday.